Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980)
5 tracks, 49 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes
Laraaji’s music is just lovely. It’s a little bit of an outlier for me, as I don’t really listen to ambient stuff and don’t know much about it. It also smacks of vague ‘Eastern spirituality,’ which is usually a bit of a turn-off. But Laraaji is so jolly and takes his music with such humour that it all just fits into place.
As far as I can tell, everything the man touches turns to bliss. This album is entirely made with various types of zither, but under the fingers of Laraaji (and helped out by the production of Brian Eno), it becomes soft waves and fluffy clouds of sound. Short themes are repeated at length with tiny variations providing elements of colour, which eventually develop into entirely new themes themselves. Eno’s introduction of many layers of electronic processing and delay makes everything shimmer into and over everything else, and the haziness of it all makes it seem like the soundtrack to a dream, or maybe an impressionist painting.
And I know that this short write up is about the album, but I also just want to point you in the direction of this Boiler Room session that Laraaji did in 2015, which was the first time I’d ever come across him. It’s not like any other Boiler Room session and it’s gloriously mad, seriously uplifting and, of course, relaxing af. Take an hour out of your day and de-stress with this:
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